Question

Why the ultimate base class of all classes in the .NET Framework called System.Object? It must be called System.Class or something because this is class not the class instance (object).

Answer 1

It’s called System.Object because every object is an object. For example, an instance of String is an Object – but a String isn’t a class, is it? The string class is a class, but that’s a different matter.

There’s System.Type to represent types, so an instance of System.Type knows what properties, methods etc the type has. So you can use something like:

Type stringType = typeof(string);
// Find out all the members of System.String using stringType...

But it wouldn’t be appropriate to be able to call GetProperties, GetMethods etc on a string itself – because a string is just a sequence of characters.